The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,280 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 46% higher than the average critic
  • 5% same as the average critic
  • 49% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 4.2 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 61
Highest review score: 100 Short Cuts
Lowest review score: 0 Gummo
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 9,381 out of 20280
  2. Mixed: 8,435 out of 20280
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20280
20280 movie reviews
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  1. Omen
    The film’s frenetic world-building eventually becomes numbing, in part because the uneven human dramas — each one offers a vague message about marginalization — lose momentum in all the commotion.
  2. Arcadian
    A competent director can do only so much with a poor script, and Arcadian is littered with shortcuts and screenwriting clichés. It is vague to the point of careless, and often seems to be inventing rules for its monsters as it goes along.
  3. Together Brothers
    Street-wise older children might find it to their taste; but all the new trappings cannot disguise the fact that "Together Brothers" is an old story, being retold perhaps wisely, but not exceptionally well.
  4. The Greatest Hits
    There’s an interesting film dancing around the edges of The Greatest Hits, but there’s both too much sentimentality and not enough thought, and that’s too bad.
  5. Bob Trevino Likes It
    Any genuine feeling emanates from Lily. Ferreira pitches herself into the trite story line with enthusiasm, and her verve breathes life into even the most leaden lines.
  6. Cold Wallet
    The storytelling economy (small cast, one main location) is welcome, but none of the four characters is the sharpest tool in the shed, and whatever insights Hodierne intends on the cutthroat world of crypto remain elusive.
  7. The Gutter
    In addition to ridiculous — think the Wayans brothers’ parody pictures, or “Napoleon Dynamite” (that movie’s director, Jared Hess, is an executive producer here) — the humor is almost uniformly broad.
  8. Egoist
    As the film leans into melodrama, it loses both its friction and frisson, and a steaming-hot premise turns into something cold to the touch.
  9. Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu
    As its return to the IMAX — I mean, silver — screen, the saga could do worse than this movie. With their main guy’s face behind metal, that’s a more than respectable showing.
  10. Fly Me to the Moon
    As the movie progresses, its story grows convoluted and belabored.
  11. Trap
    The bigger the scope and the more Cooper’s psychology is explained, the less taut the film feels.
  12. The Exorcism
    There’s a bizarrely choppy feel to the movie, as if an hour or so had been pulled out in an attempt to slim down an overstuffed story. This throws off the rhythm, stripping the film of its tension and frequently leaving us wondering what’s going on, and not in the good, creepy way.
  13. Ride
    Only Howell truly embodies the spirit of the Old West.
  14. The Mountain Men
    The frontiersmen are wild and woolly, and most of the Indians remain scalp-collecting savages. [13 Sep 1980, p.C14]
    • The New York Times
  15. Film Geek
    I appreciate Shepard’s affection: I also grew up loving movies, and I found his wistful reminiscences of being awed by “Jaws” and “Star Wars” relatable. But Shepard’s level of self-regard can be stultifying.
  16. Treasure
    Whatever complexities might come across in the book don’t register in a film that has been fashioned, sometimes uneasily, into a sentimental father-daughter road movie.
  17. You're Cordially Invited
    There is something off about You’re Cordially Invited, some sense that the whole thing never clicks into place.
  18. Sight
    All of this is laid out in competent commonplace fashion, with the principal actors Terry Chen, Greg Kinnear and the always welcome Fionnula Flanagan displaying the expected professionalism.
  19. Marcello Mio
    Some might call it a “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” for fans of European cinema. Others might say it’s a trifle. The film’s ending, however, amounts to a bemused shrug.
  20. Armand
    By the end, a kind of narrative lethargy has set in. “Armand” feels mostly like an interesting formal exercise: an attempt to meld realism and surrealism in the most nondescript of places, but in a way that evokes an ancient terror.
  21. Wolfs
    The movie is a trifle, and it knows it. Mostly, though, Wolfs, written and directed by Jon Watts, is an excuse for its two leads to riff on their own personas, which can be faintly amusing and certainly watchable but also insufferably smug. It’s insufferable a lot.
  22. How to Rob a Bank
    There’s quite a bit to chew on in this story, matters the film points to but doesn’t really examine.
  23. The War Wagon
    The Wayne-Douglas Western looks like something that the two saddle-sore stars cooked up to kill time and make a little money... It's not a bad picture, just obvious.
  24. Federer: Twelve Final Days
    Federer describes himself as an emotional guy, but with the international press and his management team nearly always on the sidelines, there’s little privacy to get personal.
  25. Battle of Britain
    These sequences—the dogfights over Dover, the disintegration of planes in mid-air, the graceful tactics of evasion—are more than just technically stunning. They also are beautiful, in the completely impersonal way that the spectacle of machines—working well and seemingly with wills of their own—can be beautiful. Unfortunately, something less than one-third of the film takes place in the air.
  26. The Front Room
    The Front Room has its virtues, including the funereal production design, with its forlorn rooms and faded wallpaper. Yet from its goo to boos, the whole enterprise is so familiar and at times rote that it feels as though Sam and Max Eggers haven’t so much directed the movie as reverse-engineered it.
  27. My Spy: The Eternal City
    Too often this muddled movie, which never really settles on a tone, plays its espionage plot points with a dour seriousness that’s at odds with a teen comedy.
  28. Here
    Don’t force a plot to emerge. Better to experience “Here” like open-eyed meditation, nodding at connections and ideas so fragile they’d disintegrate if said aloud.
  29. The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie
    The movie’s energy doesn’t pay off in dividends of real pleasure. Anarchy has never been so mere as it is ultimately rendered here.
  30. We Live in Time
    Almut’s ambitions give her spark and grit, and they make the character appealingly contemporary, as does Pugh’s vibrancy and emotionally charged performance. The actress handles the shifting periods and deepening drama adroitly, even when the filmmakers begin selling out her character.
  31. Join or Die
    Throughout, the film unabashedly adopts Putnam’s doctrine: Become a joiner or democracy is doomed. Some of the film’s points feel simplistic, and questions linger.
  32. Nutcrackers
    The film gets better whenever Stiller recedes into the background, but the movie’s insistence on Michael’s redemption story as the main narrative thread hurts it. It’s impossible to care too much about this pompous, uptight, strangely boring guy. Especially because we know how his story will end.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Gone to Earth
    Powell and Pressburger have hammered the ingredients with blunt, unyielding strokes, seasoned with vague psychological clangings and only remotely tempered with humor and real perception.
  34. The Conjuring: Last Rites
    The film is a disappointing send-off; more an eccentric family drama than a real chiller.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dillinger
    In making his debut as a director, Mr. Milius gives us a "Dillinger" that is fascinating for its speed, action and firepower. But as character studies of decidedly interesting types out of explosive history, "Dillinger" shoots blanks most of the time.
  36. I'll Be Right There
    Even as the gifted actresses trade jabs and punchlines gamely, the moments leave a sour taste.
  37. Close to You
    As attentive as Close to You is to family dynamics, its dialogue, which the actors largely improvised, rarely achieves verisimilitude.
  38. Lost on a Mountain in Maine
    “Lost on a Mountain” never fully achieves its complicated halcyon aims.
  39. Freakier Friday
    By the middle of the film, the narrative also begins to stutter, set piece after set piece, caper after caper, loping toward the inevitable moment of collision and resolution, without always maintaining the narrative tension to keep things interesting. Since we know where this is going, these bits need to be really funny, not just broadly perfunctory jokes about how generations don’t understand each other.
  40. The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim
    “The War of the Rohirrim” is worth a watch for the Tolkien faithful, especially as a fresh way to adapt the author’s work.
  41. The Falling Star
    The Falling Star offers little in the way of dramatic tension or intrigue, and its comedy, mildly clever at first, starts to feel repetitive. The word “tedious” popped into my mind a few times, perhaps because the world of the film is so small that it starts to feel airless and lacking in surprise.
  42. Apartment 7A
    It’s passably spooky, sure. But all interesting prequels have something in common: They shed new light on their predecessors that expands, illuminates or complicates them in some way. Apartment 7A feels like a predictable retread.
  43. Kill the Jockey
    The director, Luis Ortega, doesn’t give much reason to care about Remo’s conflict — the protagonist’s catatonia inspires the same in the viewer — and instead exhausts his efforts on a mannered blankness of style and mood.
  44. The Life of Chuck
    Ejiofor fills in Marty with dabs of personality and a sense of decency that suggests that while humanity is lost, not every individual is. It’s too bad the movie doesn’t stick with Marty, who warms it up appreciably.
  45. K-Pops!
    It has its momentary charms, mostly when it’s just .Paak and Rasheed riffing off each other, with the buoyant chemistry of a real father and son, or, when we see .Paak be less BJ under K-pop’s bright lights and more himself, just the artist with a mic and a set of drums.
  46. The Menendez Brothers
    To the extent the film has appeal, it is of the tabloid variety.
  47. Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell
    The film, written by John Elder and directed by Terence Fisher, is not without its intentional giggles. Compared with "Andy Warhol's Frankenstein," however, it is very straight and solemn, chock full of the old horror film values we don't see much of any more.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Horror of Frankenstein
    It's not only painless but also fun.
  49. Allswell in New York
    If few of the melodramatic plot lines wrap up by the end, at least the members of the ensemble cast commit to their roles with naturalistic gusto.
  50. Sweethearts
    This direct-to-streaming bauble benefits from two leads whose charm effortlessly outshines the material.
  51. Absolution
    Wrapped in drab visuals and a doomy atmosphere, Absolution paints a world where lowlifes rule and neither doctors nor priests can be trusted. Yet there are moments when the beatdowns pause and a misty melancholy shines through.
  52. The Mother and the Bear
    Like any decent soap, The Mother and the Bear is powered by human dramas that are contrived, silly and ultimately a little weird. But what actually happens belie what is in execution a relatively sedate story about the spoken frictions and unspoken secrets between mother and daughter, father and son.
  53. After: Poetry Destroys Silence
    The director hasn’t found a rhythm or pace to lend momentum to this exploration of disparate material.
  54. Mary
    No genre gesture goes untapped in the deliberately hagiographic “Mary,” a coming-of-age saga about the mother of Jesus. Directed by D.J. Caruso and written by Timothy Michael Hayes, the film aims to draw multitudes.
  55. What Just Happened
    The lampooning is sometimes funny and occasionally offers up a tidbit of small truth. But much of it is awfully familiar.
  56. Witches
    If all women behaving badly can be summed up as witchy, then Sankey’s documentary too often works like a game of associations.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    It All Came True
    Neither comedy, strictly speaking, nor good red gangsterism, nor an altogether creditable combination of both.
  58. Queens
    In this case, thematic focus is bit of a buzz kill, pulling an otherwise unique portrait onto generic grounds.
  59. The Roaring Twenties
    With a commentator's voice interpolating ultra-dramatic commonplaces as the film unreels, their melodrama has taken on an annoying pretentiousness which neither the theme nor its treatment can justify.
  60. Wuthering Heights
    Robbie and Elordi hold your attention well enough, though they’re more persuasive apart than when they’re together.
  61. Eat the Night
    The film’s escalating violence frequently smothers its sweeter, more haunting moments, such as Night using the game to ease Apolline’s fear of losing her brother.
  62. G20
    Intensions aside, G20 plays well as a silly action movie. I certainly cackled throughout, making it easy to shrug off the incoherence of the conspiracy plot and the obligatory supermom additions.
  63. Key Largo
    The script prepared by Mr. Huston and Richard Brooks was too full of words and highly cross-purposed implications to give the action full chance.
  64. The Ballad of Wallis Island
    Bereft of chuckles or even a substantial story, this maudlin musical fable never escapes the drag of a lead character with supporting-player energy.
  65. Kiss of the Spider Woman
    For the most part, though, the X factor of elegance, sensuality and verve that made MGM musicals so memorable is missing here. You want to give an encouraging grade for effort, but effort is also the last thing you want to see in a musical.
  66. Rabbit Trap
    Rabbit Trap, the horror folk tale from Bryn Chainey, is that unfortunate kind of creation: a work that so clearly possesses the tools that might make a good, captivating film, but instead ends up lost in the workshop, too busy admiring its own handiwork.
  67. The Thing with Feathers
    Cumberbatch gives himself fully to the task of abjection, plunging us into the shadows and chaos of Dad’s life. But the movie neglects to make Mum’s presence palpable — and that is a loss.
  68. Jimpa
    The men give Jimpa a warm, intergenerational quality, gesturing at the power of queer family over time. If only the film didn’t ask the audience to invest in so very many subplots; the clutter ends up sucking the air out of all of them.
  69. Kitty Foyle
    The sharpness and contemporary significance of Mr. Morley's commentary are missing.
  70. After the Hunt
    After the Hunt seems wildly desperate to be seen as provocative about things like cancel culture and the “feminist generation gap.” But my overriding sense was that some earlier, better version of the script exists, and all the political stuff was stapled on later to make it feel more “relevant.”
  71. Queen of the Ring
    It’s a middling entry into the biographical sports movie genre, and the director, Ash Avildsen, cannot resist pummeling his audience with a simplistic girl-power message.
  72. Locked
    The performers hold their ground even if the script simply goes through the motions — the car-as-prison may at first come off like a new jam, and yet you’ve definitely seen it all before.
  73. Clown in a Cornfield
    A lackluster horror movie gets points if the leading villain is a real bugaboo. But the Frendos, alas, look like poser versions of Pennywise, Art the Clown and other, scarier horror bozos.
  74. Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted
    This fans-only documentary gets bogged down with dull asides.
  75. The Trouble with Jessica
    A critique about the hypocrisies of the righteous upper middle class unfolds halfheartedly, leaving us with performances that might’ve worked better in a sketch comedy scene.
  76. Turnabout
    So far as we're concerned, this self-conscious fantasy of a husband and wife who reverse their biological status is a tired and tiresome jape, as subtle as a five-cent stogie and just as aromatic.
  77. Angel on My Shoulder
    The story is so imitative—and is repeated so dutifully—that it's hard to feel any more towards it than a mildly nostalgic regard.
  78. The Smashing Machine
    Johnson’s performance is the magnetic center of the film, and unless you’re a huge fan of watching this kind of fighting, it’s also the whole reason to watch the movie.
  79. I Know What You Did Last Summer
    If only these intriguing elements were attached to a more exciting film: We may live among our ghosts, but it’s only fun if they’re actually scaring us.
  80. Rust
    What is undeniable is that because Rust looks as good as it does, every time riders on horseback appear against a florid sky, it isn’t the characters you think about — it’s Halyna Hutchins.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    It Came from Outer Space
    Merely mildly diverting, not stupendous.
  82. Electra
    What’s not convincingly nailed by the film’s moody bravado is the grief propelling its flirtatious and fraught quartet toward presumptive tragedy.
  83. Sketch
    A children’s film that fares better with its nimble special effects than its clunky dramatics.
  84. The History of Sound
    The History of Sound doesn’t trust its own gentleness, and the inertia of the filmmaking gives the whole affair a detached, try-hard feeling.
  85. Honey Don't!
    Cooke and Coen’s winding narrative feels muted and underdeveloped, making the film’s offscreen deaths and treacherous reveals feel less like cosmic twists of fate than speed bumps that yield small chuckles and sighs.
  86. Echo Valley
    Battling downpours and an abundance of nighttime shadows, the cinematographer Benjamin Kracun adds a classy, coppery richness where he can. But “Echo Valley,” directed by Michael Pearce (whose 2018 feature debut, “Beast,” mingled equally dissonant themes with far greater dexterity), is ultimately undone by Brad Ingelsby’s distracted script.
  87. The Kiss
    Despite the best efforts of the cast and technical crew here, The Kiss winds up in the land of “meh.”
  88. Eleanor the Great
    There’s enough in Eleanor the Great to still make it watchable, especially the genuinely moving intergenerational connection between two women who need each other to move past their particular grief. If only the world around them had been developed more carefully, too.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Secret Agent
    It is a defect of the screen narrative that all the spies seem to be continually engaged in melodramatic shadow boxing and that the authors, who couldn't have been Mr. Maugham, never really make out a case for the necessity of spying and never convince you that there is anything in Geneva worth spying on. But there are scattered high-lights.
  90. Jamaica Inn
    Jamaica Inn will not be remembered as a Hitchcock picture, but as a Charles Laughton picture.
  91. Fixed
    The film can’t quite fill in much beyond its initial wacky conceit, lacking the extra narrative and comedic pieces to match, for better or worse, a counterpart like “Sausage Party,” Seth Rogen’s own bawdy animation entry.
  92. The Man in My Basement
    Streamlined a little, it would have made for a rich text. But as it is, it’s too much to wade through.
  93. The Lost Bus
    Greengrass knows how to shoot and cut, but The Lost Bus is at once too high-minded and too exploitative to work. However skilled the cinematography and editing, there is no saving a movie predicated on looming death with badly written characters and such a frustratingly narrow point of view.
  94. Queens of the Dead
    It’s all meant to be viewed through the lens of camp, that increasingly diluted and all-too-broad category that here feels more like an excuse for the film’s flat construction than an aesthetic approach. Though you’ll get a few laughs out of its cast.
  95. The Travel Companion
    There is charm in the film’s allusions to New York City indie filmmaking, like the crew member who fibs that he’s shooting a mayonnaise commercial. But that specificity does not extend to Simon and Bruce’s bond, which consists of parallel play or the odd story about getting too stoned.
  96. All You Need Is Kill
    By narrowing the scope and condensing the logic of the action, this film undermines the excitement of the story, so even the day of an alien apocalypse starts to get tedious. That’s a great misfortune given the movie’s funky style.
  97. Scarlet
    “Scarlet” is peppered with a few exceptional moments of inspiration, but ends up caught in an awkward push-pull between Shakespeare’s text and the fantastical spaces where Hosoda’s vision extends.
  98. Ghosts of Mississippi
    True as it is, Reiner's film feels like the Hollywood version.
  99. Ballad of a Small Player
    Ballad of a Small Player contains a great story, but it’s bogged down by its trappings. Perhaps it just got a little too greedy.
  100. Steve
    In hewing closely to Steve, the whole affair takes on a grating note of self-sacrifice, of perseverance through suffering.
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